Hyperthreading, H/W Security Kick Off IDF

SAN JOSE–Intel’s president opened the Intel Developer Forum here by hearkening back to the futurewhile slipping in a commitment to Palladium-style trusted computing, which Intel calls LaGrande.

Paul Otellini, president and chief operating officer of Intel, said that the third era of computing will be based on the convergence of communication and computing, a topic that’s become the focus of 2002. Intel’s spring IDF and Microsoft’s WinHEC show also focused on these themes.

The first era of computing, as Otellini has said before, involved the introduction of the mainframe, while the second era of computing marked the development of the personal computer. The third? The integration of communications capabilities.

“All computers will communicate, and all communication devices will compute,” Otellini said.

Otellini also said that hyperthreading, a technology used in some of Intel’s Xeon processors, would be included in the 3-GHz Pentium 4 due out in the fourth quarter of this year. Software designed for a hyperthreaded processor allows the processor to act on more than one application thread at once, reducing the possibility that a processor will stall out due to lack of data. About a quarter of Intel’s desktop processor production in 2003 will be hyperthreaded-enabled, Otellini said.

Palladium is Mictrosoft’s offshoot of the Trusted Computing Platform (TCPA), an initiative which attempts to safeguard computing from hackers and other unauthorized intruders. Palladium has received extensive scrutiny both from consumers who have worried about whether they would actually “own” content produced by Hollywood and other sources, and whether a Microsoft-developed initiative would allow the use of third-party software and OSes, namely Linux.

The second question appears to have been answered. LaGrande “will deliver a foundation” to a trusted computing environment, Otellini said, with protected execution of programs, protected memory, and protected storage. LaGrande will be Palladium-compliant, but not necessarily Microsoft-specific. “We’re working with the industry to do this,” Otellini said, adding that Intel is working with privacy experts and other companies.

Although Otellini did not address the question directly in his speech, analysts said they were persuaded to believe that LaGrande would allow Linux to run. “LaGrande is Intel typically hedging its bets as far as processor platforms are concerned,” said Dean McCarron, analyst with Mercury Research Corp., Cave Creek, Ariz.

LaGrande will be rolled out in both chipsets and processors. In a question-and-answer session, Otellini said LaGrande “is enabled in a next-generation architecture from IntelI didn’t say which one.” Later, though, Otellini said the technology was scheduled for the next-generation Intel architecture, most likely the Prescott chip in 2003. The exact timing, however, will be tied to the convergence of secure hardware and software.

An Intel spokesman said that LaGrande would not be tied to a specific machine through a unique identifier, as was the processor serial number that Intel tried to implement in the 1990s. TCPA-enabled machines have included a chip that uniquely identifies the machine. Early LaGrande implementation have included a switch that allows a toggling on and off of secure computing, the spokesman said.

In a break from previous IDFs, both Microsoft and Intel shared the stage. Jim Allchin, an executive at Microsoft, ran through a list of familiar features and initiatives that merge both computing and communication.

Intel also said it would implement a “software college” that would tutor developers in how to port applications from Intel platform to another, such as X86 to Xscale or another Intel embedded platform.

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